DIY: Homemade Garlic Chile Sauce

Oh, sriracha. I adore that stuff. At some point in the last year or so, it supplanted Tobasco as my favorite hot sauce. It’s sweet, it’s spicy, and with a nice dose of garlic, it’s far more flavorful than the little bottle with the red lid.

And with only 5 ingredients, it’s so easy to make your own garlic chile sauce at home. Fresher. And with less (no!) xanthum gum.

The red bell peppers give body to the sauce as well as sweeten it naturally (no added sugar!). And then you’ll get the heat. If you’re not big on heat, consider using less peppers than the recipe calls for (the original recipe called for 4 habaneros or other spicy red or orange peppers).

I used tepin chiles after my 2-year-old stumbled upon a small bush growing wild in our backyard. “Strawberry hurt” were the first words she finally muttered after several minutes of crying and drooling like she had rabies. And for good reason – tepin chiles are hot.

Like, crazy *@&!#% hot. They’re either almost as hot as habanero peppers or as hot as habanero peppers, depending on which site you look at. They’re the official native pepper of Texas (the distinction is important so as not to offend jalapenos) and mostly grow wild because the seeds won’t germinate unless they’ve passed through a bird.

Our wild little plant is growing in the neglected corner of the backyard… right under a power line.

Because the sauce doesn’t have any commercial thickeners, the texture will resemble a fresh, homemade tomato salsa. And after the flavors get a chance to settle for a few days, you’re only problem will be figuring out how to work a spoonful of the vibrant red-orange sauce into everything from breakfast to dessert

Homemade Garlic Chile Sauce

A sweet and garlicky chile sauce for sriracha fans that's made with summer's freshest - and hottest - peppers.

This post is so timely- my mother-in-law and I were watching the Food Network recently when I asked her, “What IS sriracha? I’m hearing about it everywhere,” and she said, “Never heard of it.” So I’m sending her a link to this! Thanks!

I recently bought some of this to use in a drunken noodles recipe and holy sh&t ^*%& mother hell lover I didn’t realize how spicy it was until I dumped a 1/4 cup of it into the rest of my sauce. This recipe is definitely getting made so I can dial down the heat factor in it to “wimpy.”

Whoa, this might be life-changing! I use chili garlic sauce in a lot of my recipes but I always feel a little guilty that it’s not “clean” (ie, sometimes has sugar, thickeners, etc.) I never knew you could make your own!

I just found a tepin plant in my back yard! Actually a friend of mine found it hiding way in the corner, growing up against our fence. As soon as I saw it, I remembered this blog post and was so excited! I just got the rest of the ingredients I need to make the chile garlic sauce…just in time for Christmas presents! I can’t wait to try this sauce, and the tepin chiles themselves, in various recipes.

You can grow tepin chiles from seed! My Daddy always had them when I was growing up. He found one wild somewhere and brought them home, extracted the seeds and dried them on paper towels in the sun. They grew very well for him, but he’s gone now and I have no clue if he kept any seeds, but I sure wish he had.